Exploring human factors in context aware services.

As microchip and sensing technologies have developed, more and more context aware applications have been introduced to our daily lives. Many of the applications have been proposed to improve the quality of life, and furthermore, to engage the end users with a richer or augmented environment. However, although many researchers bring innovative ideas to the field of context aware computing, there is still a lack of human factors research in many projects, which could reduce the envisaged user acceptance and adoption.This research takes a human-centred perspective, which mainly aims to explore the human factors and their relationships involved in context aware activities. Both deductive and inductive methods were used to achieve this aim. More specifically, qualitative methods like focus groups and interviews were used to identify the human factors in context aware activity. Quantitative methods like survey and empirical experiment were used to examine the relationships between the identified factors. The results of this research provided empirical evidence of the effects of different motivations on user's preference and behaviour in context aware adaptation. This influence was observed during the empirical experiment. A conceptual framework for the human factors involved in context aware activities was proposed and developed based on literature review and the results from the empirical studies, which consists of four sub-domains relating user's motivation, perception, preference and subjective experience.In addition, the results also show the capability of the empirical method used for this research. The revised method was further reviewed by digital designers from local companies. The method is presented to help designers to identify and evaluate the human factors involved in context aware activities, and therefore to materialize their good ideas to real pleasant part of our lives.